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Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
Club Notice - 02/20/98 -- Vol. 16, No. 34
MT Chair/Librarian:
Mark Leeper MT 3E-433 732-957-5619 mleeper@lucent.com
HO Chair: John Jetzt MT 2E-530 732-957-5087 jetzt@lucent.com
HO Librarian: Nick Sauer HO 4F-427 732-949-7076 njs@lucent.com
Distinguished Heinlein Apologist:
Rob Mitchell MT 2D-536 732-957-6330 rlmitchell1@lucent.com
Factotum: Evelyn Leeper MT 3E-433 732-957-2070 eleeper@lucent.com
Back issues at http://www.geocities.com/Athens/4824
All material copyright by author unless otherwise noted.
The Science Fiction Association of Bergen County meets on the
second Saturday of every month in Upper Saddle River; call
201-933-2724 for details. The New Jersey Science Fiction Society
meets irregularly; call 201-652-0534 for details, or check
http://www.interactive.net/~kat/njsfs.html. The Denver Area
Science Fiction Association meets 7:30 PM on the third Saturday of
every month at Southwest State Bank, 1380 S. Federal Blvd.
1. URL of the week: http://www.omniway.sm/aasfn/ef5e.htm.
Contributed by Charlie Harris.
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2. I am willing to bet you never gave it a whole lot of thought,
but Physics is not a very nice science. It has a really good
reputation, that that is where all the really smart people go, but
that is because other sciences like Chemistry do not get their due.
Physics and Chemistry sit next to each other like New York and New
Jersey. All the really interesting cutting edge stuff seems to go
on in Physics. Chemistry has a bad reputation, in large part
because, like New Jersey, it smells bad. I mean, most of us have
had the experience of walking by a chemical lab in school and
smelling something that has seemed to us, well..., not quite right.
It is kind of like driving down the Jersey Turnpike. You know
there is something that smells really bad. You know that it is a
smell that would not come out of Mother Nature unless you were
torturing her in some really unnatural way. I mean, Heaven knows
there are some really bad smells that ARE natural, but not so bad
as some of the stuff on the Jersey Turnpike. You only get smells
like that by taking dead dinosaur remains, and pumping them up from
their graves, and subjecting them to extreme heat, and sending the
gasses through pipes. This sort of thing would rarely happen by
chance in nature. You and I both know that it takes humans to do
something this unnatural and perverse. And you walk by the
Chemistry Lab at any university you get that same feeling of
something unnatural going on in there. I am sure not all Chemistry
smelled bad. But in general in Chemistry the feeling is that
nothing productive or cutting edge can ever come from something
that does not smell bad. I suspect somebody is selling aerosol
cans of bad smell to spray around Chemistry labs to make sure
people know that something impressive and cutting edge and
hopefully carcinogenic is going on.
So while Chemistry labs have gotten a bad name, Physics labs have a
much better reputation. Like New York City, there are nifty things
going on here. You have steel balls rolling down ramps and hitting
wheels, turning linear momentum into angular momentum. You know,
nifty stuff like that. So what has happened? People have come to
believe that the nifty stuff is all in Physics. Chemistry becomes
something of a malodorous joke. What happens, however, is that it
becomes a self-fulfilling prediction that the nifty stuff will be
called Physics. I think the real cutting edge Physics is really
Chemistry being called Physics because it sounds better. When most
people think of Physics they think of dropping steel balls from
high places and seeing how long it takes them to fall and how high
they bounce. Chemistry is the stuff where you look at how water
breaks down into oxygen and hydrogen and cutely goes "toot" when
you set a match to the hydrogen. So you know water is made up of
two clear gasses, one of which goes "toot."
But now consider this stuff of looking at sub-atomic particles and
coming up with humorous names for new kinds of quarks. That is,
looking at what makes up matter. Is that more like dropping steel
balls or looking at what goes into the recipe to make water? I
would claim it is much more like the Chemistry. But we are told
that Chemical reactions take place between atoms at the molecular
level. But if you start looking at reactions going on at just a
slightly tinier level, at the sub-atomic level, it's "Sorry,
Mr. Chemist, why don't you go someplace and amalgamate nitrogen or
something? This is a job for a Physicist." Maybe I am wrong
choosing New York and New Jersey. It sounds almost like a Hitler-
like Physics carving off a Sudetenland-like piece of Chemistry and
declaring it be really a piece of Physics. And they do it because
we have all let them get away with it. It is because Physics makes
big explosions and we all want peace in our times. But what's
next. Are we going to be told that Psychology is really Physics?
What about Botany? Is the beloved Mathematics really safe?
Physics could claim it all. [-mrl]
Mark Leeper
MT 3E-433 732-957-5619